Dusting

Rita Dove is one of the most preeminent living poets in the United States. She was the United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and the Virginia Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2006. She is the only poet ever to receive both the National Humanities Medal (awarded in 1996 by President Bill Clinton) and the National Medal of Arts (awarded in 2011 by President Barack Obama). She has published 11 books of poetry as well as an essay collection, a short story collection, translations, one novel, and one play in verse. Dove is known for her precise, evocative language and keen observational eye. Her work often explores personal, familial, and historical narratives. Her writing explores a wide range of themes and ideas, and her body of work cannot be described by a single aesthetic.

“Dusting” was first published in the November 1981 issue of Poetry Magazine. The poem follows a woman’s mind as she performs housework, putting her complicated emotions and her rich inner life on display. It appeared in Dove’s second book of poetry, Museum (Carnegie Mellon Press, 1983), then as part of her third and most well-known collection, Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon Press, 1986), which went on to win the 1987 Pulitzer Prize.

Poet Biography

Rita Frances Dove was born on August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Ray A. Dove, was a research chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. He and her mother, Elvira Hord, encouraged their daughter’s passion for reading and learning. Dove excelled in school. She loved to play cello and read poetry, and she was a majorette in the marching band. She graduated from Buchtel High School in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar.

Dove began writing seriously during her college years at Miami University in Ohio. She graduated summa cum laude in 1973 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. From 1974 to 1975, she studied at the University of Tübingen in Germany as a Fulbright scholar. She went on to study writing at the University of Iowa, where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977. She met her future husband, Fred Viebahn, while he was a Fulbright scholar from Germany at the University of Iowa. The two married in 1979 and had a daughter in 1983.

Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989. She published several poems in literary journals and magazines before her first poetry collection, The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie Mellon Press) appeared in 1980, followed by her second book, Museum, in 1983. Her third and most famous book, Thomas and Beulah (1986), is a narrative book of poems about her maternal grandparents. Thomas and Beulah (1986) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1987. Dove began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1989. She was named the United States Poet Laureate in 1993, then the youngest person to hold the office. She read her poem, “Lady Freedom Among Us,” at the United States Bicentennial ceremony in 1994. Her play in verse, The Darker Face of the Earth (Story Line Press), debuted at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996.

Dove held the Commonwealth Professor of English chair at the University of Virginia from 1993 to 2020. She published three poetry collections, including one book of selected poems, between 1993 and 1999. Her 2009 collection, Sonata Mulattica (W. W. Norton & Co), tells the partially-fictionalized history of George Bridgetower, an 18th-century racially diverse musical prodigy. Sonata Mulattica (2009) won the 2010 Huston-Wright Legacy Award. Dove edited the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) anthology. Her most recent poetry collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (W. W. Norton & Co, 2021), was named a Top Book of 2021 by the New York Times. She became the 16th recipient of the Gold Medal in poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner in 2022. She is currently the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Poem Text

Dove, Rita. “Dusting.” November 1981. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem begins in a “solarium” (Line 4), or sunroom, so bright it is “a rage / of light” (Lines 4-5). The speaker narrates Beulah dusting “among knicknacks” (Line 3). She uses a gray dust cloth to polish a dark wood surface. The wood comes “to life” (Line 7) as she works, the features of the grain gleaming “darker still” (Line 10).

Beulah dusts absentmindedly and recalls a moment from her youth. Once, when she went to a carnival, she shared a kiss with a “silly boy” (Line 12) at the rifle booth. At the end of the night, she brought home a “clear bowl with one bright / fish” (Lines 13-14). She continues to dust, each “stroke a deep breath” (Line 19), and struggles to remember this boy’s name. She thinks of Michael, but that is not quite right—the boy’s name was “something finer” (Line 18).

Another memory comes to Beulah. Sometime after the carnival, she came back home from a dance and found the front door to her house blown in by the wind. It was a winter night, and the cold “parlor / in snow” (Lines 23-24) froze the carnival fish in his bowl. Beulah hurried to save the fish. She put the bowl of ice on top of the stove to melt. Miraculously, “the locket of ice / dissolved” (Lines 26-27), and the thawed fish “swam free” (Line 28).

Beulah places these moments in the timeline of her life. The carnival and the fish are memories from unmarried life. This was before the meaning of her name changed to “Promise, then / Desert-in-Peace” (Lines 33-34). It was also before the tree, the “sun’s accomplice” (Line 36), cast its shadow. All of a sudden, the name comes to her: “Maurice” (Line 37).